About Continuous Coordination

Modern knowledge work is broken. We’ve over-engineered “process tech” — project management, performance management, coding agents, workflow automation, et cetera — and overlooked the fundamentals that drive real human collaboration. We’re communicating with our tools and systems instead of each other.

And in doing so, we’ve lost the plot for progress, swamped in a dizzying constellation of tools, time zones, tasks, notifications, interruptions, mandates, emails, issues, chats, and back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings. It’s a productivity-killing, morale-sapping burnout machine.

What’s worse is the exasperated tendency to accept this mess as the status quo. “That’s just how it is here at XYZ Co, like everywhere.”

But it’s not like this everywhere. With decades of experience in remote, hybrid, and distributed work, Adam and I have had the good fortune of witnessing and contributing within tech’s highest-performing organizations. Places where it’s invigorating to work. Where managers, contributors, and teams build things in harmony. Where Zoom fatigue is not a thing.

What do these standout orgs have in common? A people-first approach for collaborating and communicating that supersedes time, geography, and team boundaries. Continuous Coordination is the distillation of this approach.

Continuous Coordination started as a set of ideas — practices distilled from decades of running knowledge work teams that we believed could improve how organizations coordinate. We wrote them down, pressure-tested them with colleagues, our customers, and industry thought leaders, and published them under an open-source license so they could evolve as work evolves.

We built Steady to put Continuous Coordination into practice. Steady is a lightweight teamwork OS that connects your entire stack and runs Continuous Coordination automatically, giving everyone in an organization the context, time, and autonomy they need to do great work together.

For more information about redistribution, republishing, remixing and/or contributing to the Continuous Coordination document, please visit the GitHub repository.

Henry Poydar
Adam Stoddard